Facebook & Microsoft's Giant Undersea Cable

Published May 31st at 1:00pm

Facebook and Microsoft are not exactly common bedfellows when it comes to the great partnerships in the digital world. However, the two tech giants have teamed up on perhaps one of the most ambitious projects of the century. They want to bury a 6,600 km cable deep under the Atlantic Ocean, stretching all the way from Virginia to Spain. The question is why? And, like all these projects, the motives are not altruistic. It’s about extending their data empire.

The project, called MAREA- the Spanish for “tide” - will provide up to 160 tbps of bandwidth (about 16 million times the bandwidth of your home Internet connection) and will allow the two tech giants to more efficiently move vast swathes of information between the many computer data centers and network hubs that facilitate their services. “If you look at the cable systems across the Atlantic, a majority land in the Northeast somewhere,” says Najam Ahmad, Facebook’s vice president of network engineering. “This gives us so many more options.”

Although this is undoubtedly the most ambitious project of it’s kind, Facebook and Microsoft are not the first to try something like this. Google has invested in two undersea cables that stretch from the West Coast of the United States to Japan, another that connects the US and Brazil, and a network of cables that connect various parts of Asia. Rather than just leasing bandwidth on undersea cables and land connections operated by telecom companies, the likes of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are building their own networking infrastructure both on land and across the seas - a sign of just how much data these giants must move.

In addition to building its own undersea cable, Facebook is buying up what’s called “dark fiber” (unused terrestrial cables) so that it can control how its data moves from place to place and move it more efficiently. According to Ahmad, Facebook is now using dark fiber “pretty much everywhere” as the company expands its network into new regions. It’s safe to assume the same goes for Google and Microsoft too.

Leaders in the industry believe that these plans are something of a watershed moment; “We’re starting to see more of the large Internet content providers looking to build more of their own networks - whether they are leasing dark fiber or laying down new cables to build new routes,” says Michael Murphy, president and CEO of telecom consultancy NEF. “It makes sense.”

As impressive as this project will be when it comes to fruition, it does raise some serious questions for the sector. MAREA and similar projects will inevitably start impacting upon a market once controlled by the big telecom companies. “It’s going to get interesting. Who is the real telecommunications provider?” Murphy says. “It’s going to take some of their business away.”